1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ancillary additive manufacturing system, especially to an ancillary additive manufacturing system applied for manufacturing reconstructed model.
2. Description of the Prior Art(s)
Cancer is the top killer in modern society. Take Taiwan for example, cancer has continuously occupied the first position in death since 1982. Furthermore, the growth rate of oral cancer patients is the fastest among all kinds of cancer patients, with about 5400 new diagnosis cases and about 2300 deaths by oral cancer each year.
Currently, common oral cancer therapies include chemotherapy, radiotherapy, or oral surgery. The oral surgery comprises oral resection and oral reconstruction. The range of the oral resection depends on the cancer stage and may include cranial face, mandible, maxilla, etc. The oral reconstruction follows after the oral resection and includes craniofacial reconstruction, mandible reconstruction, maxilla reconstruction, etc. The common mandible reconstruction is made by fibula of calf. Therefore, doctors need to execute cancer cells resection and fibular osteotomy at the same time. Furthermore, the shape and size of fibula need redesign according to the range of the oral resection. Inasmuch as the preceding complex steps of the oral surgery, the oral surgery always takes more than 3 to 4 hours and lots of healthcare human resources. Besides, the long surgery time of the oral surgery also increases the risk of wound exposure of the patient.
A conventional additive manufacturing machine can easily and quickly manufacture prototype models through additive process. The doctor might use the conventional additive manufacturing machine for building the reconstruction model to shorten the overall surgery time. The conventional additive manufacturing machine only comprises one tank for loading the ink material and one inkjet head for producing the desired model; however, a desired model for reconstruction is typically consisted of multiple biomaterials. Therefore, the conventional additive manufacturing machine of the aforementioned features still fails to satisfy the requirements of the surgery and fails to manufacture the models with the desired output speed.
To overcome the shortcomings, the present invention provides an ancillary additive manufacturing system to mitigate or obviate the aforementioned problems.